Alarmed at the prospect of so drastic a diet the mock-invalid began to protest, and asked if it was not possible to indicate exactly what it was he suffered from.
“Nothing simpler,” replied Cagliostro. “Superfluity of bile in the medical faculty.”
The two students, finding themselves caught in the trap they had set for him, stammered their apologies as best they could. Whereupon Cagliostro, perceiving their discomfiture, good-naturedly set them at ease and invited them to breakfast, with the result that they were converted into ardent admirers.
He did not desire, however, to be known only as a healer of the sick.
In the exhibitions he gave of his occult or psychic powers, he soon eclipsed every other contemporary celebrity from the number and variety of the phenomena he performed. Everybody wished to witness these wonders, and those who were denied the privilege were never tired of describing them in detail as if they had seen them, or of listening in turn to their recital. The memoirs of the period are filled with the marvels of his séances at which he read—by means of colombes and pupilles—the future and the past, in mirrors, carafes, and crystals; of his predictions, his cures, and his evocations of the dead, who appeared at his command to rejoice or to terrify, as the case might be, those in compliance with whose wishes he had summoned them from the grave.
Every day some new and fantastic story was circulated about him.
It was related, for example, that one day after a dinner-party at Chaillot, at which the company consisted chiefly of ladies, he was asked by his hostess to procure partners for her friends who had expressed the desire to dance.
“M. de Cagliostro,” she said half-seriously, half-playfully, “you have only to employ your supernatural powers to fetch us some officers from the Ecole Militaire.”
“True,” he replied, going to a window from which this institution could be seen in the distance, “it only requires an invisible bridge between them and us.”
A burst of ironical laughter greeted his words. Indignant, he extended his arm in the direction of the Hôtel des Invalides, which could also be seen from the window. A few minutes later eighteen veterans with cork-legs arrived at the house!